We had a wonderful presentation on XNA and Robotics studio by William Steele from Microsoft at our CINNUG user group. As always he presented all the concepts nicely and we had a lot of fun. Its amazing to see where robotics studio is today and even more amazing to realize that Robotics studio depends on XNA.

Bill recommended a good tool to create 3D models for games: Anim8or (http://www.anim8or.com). Its free, its been developed by an employee of NVidia and is widely used. I also looked at Maya. I like Maya for the feature set but not for the price.

I have a decision to make regarding the tool of choice to create models. Blender was recommended also. RenderMan is another.

I believe the approach i am going to take is
a) Use Anim8or to see if it meets my needs. If it does, no further action required.
b) Look at RenderMan next
c) Look at Maya last.

By the time i get to C i need to have 5-6K ready.

Robotics studio looks cool but if u XNA like me then one can only do so much. I gotta XNA.